Solito: A Memoir
Javier Zamora
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Solito: A Memoir
Javier Zamora
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
The southern border has long been popular terrain for novelists and beat reporters looking to make a name. But here, with Solito, Zamora makes the subject feel fresh with a shift of perspective: This account is told from the point of view of Chepito, Zamora’s 9-year-old self. Zamora writes in such a way that you never forget that this harrowing journey is being experienced by a child.
... an important book that refocuses the immigration debate by writing about — and from the perspective of — the most important aspect of it: the people who leave home behind and risk everything to look for a better life in the United States.
The magic of this book lies not only in the beguiling voice of young Javier, or the harrowing journey and immense bravery of the migrants, or in the built-in hero’s journey of this narrative...The magic comes from the deep humanity with which Zamora tells the story...It is not romantic; no one is an angel or a superhero...No one is pure evil...These are flawed and complicated people caught in a flawed and complicated system that compels them to leave their countries and then punishes them for doing so...And while 'Solito' has nothing overtly political to say about this deeply politicized subject, it feels like the beating heart at the very center of all the noise..
In heartbreaking detail, Javier Zamora’s Solito: A Memoir recounts the author’s unaccompanied journey to a new country.
Zamora’s timely memoir helps provide some answers.
... poetic.
The narrative is vivid as Zamora relates remembered (or recreated) dialogue and description.
The harrowing journey of a 9-year-old Salvadoran boy through Guatemala and Mexico to rejoin his parents in the U.S...The author, now a poet who has been both a Stegner and Radcliffe fellow, meticulously re-creates his tense, traumatic journey, creating a page-turning narrative that reads like fiction...Sprinkling Spanish words and phrases throughout, Zamora fashions fully fleshed portraits of his fellow travelers—e.g., a protective mother and her daughter and a variety of men who assumed leadership responsibilities—as they navigated buses and boats, packing into a single room in motels, passing through checkpoints (not always successfully), and walking for days in the desert with little food or water...Along the way, the migrants, most of them desperately trying to reach their families in the U.S., also had to learn Mexican words and change their accents in order to remain inconspicuous and avoid the dreaded La Migra...Beautifully wrought work that renders the migrant experience into a vivid, immediately accessible portrayal..
Poet Zamora presents an immensely moving story of desperation and hardship in this account of his childhood migration from El Salvador to the U.S. to reunite with his parents—who left during the Salvadoran Civil War—nine-year-old Zamora was forced to rely on the help of coyotes to get to America in 1999...This sheds an urgent and compassionate light on the human lives caught in an ongoing humanitarian crisis..